A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's attempt to end deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants, who are allowed to live and work in the US legally under Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
A day before the TPS was set to lapse, US judge Ana Reyes stated that the Department of Homeland Security lacked the necessary facts and legal grounds for their termination decision.
Plaintiffs charge that Secretary [Kristi] Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely, Reyes wrote in her ruling.
The Trump administration has previously argued that TPS programs encourage illegal immigration and have been misused and extended by Democrats.
TPS is designed to prevent US officials from deporting immigrants to countries that are deemed unsafe due to natural disasters, armed conflicts, or other crises.
In a detailed 83-page ruling, Reyes denied the administration's motion to dismiss a lawsuit aimed at preserving deportation protections while the case progresses through the courts. It was noted that the plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders.
Haiti was designated for TPS following the catastrophic earthquake in 2010, with the status being extended on multiple occasions, most recently in 2021 by the Biden administration.
The Trump administration has sought to dismantle many TPS programs, potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of migrants from various countries, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Honduras, and Venezuela.
